By Chen Tamir
Photography is caught between an invocation and a denial of death.1 On the one hand, it petrifies a scene, a moment. When sitters “hold still, smile, and say ‘cheese’,” they are fully aware of how they look at that moment, or at least how the camera sees them, will be carried into the future and seen by others. It is like a little moment of death, or of loss — what Roland Barthes calls “mortification.”2 The moment the photographer releases the shutter is the moment to be remembered (or imagined) by whoever sees the photograph in the future. Even if it is seen the day after the photograph was taken, there is a melancholy to it as an object of the past, of time enduring.
